Ingenuity

In a little restaurant with $2 meals served on large plates, Gustavo tells me a story:
A few months ago a Japanese firm invented a machine to catch thieves in supermarkets. In London it caught 300 thieves in one day. In New York, 1400. The first day it was installed in a supermarket in Medellín, it was stolen.

Fame

Bon Jovi is coming to Colombia!
Sort of.
No insurance company will cover his stay, so, in fact, he’s not staying at all. He’ll be in Bogotá for five hours – long enough to give one concert – before flying in a private jet to a Caribbean island.

Colombians don't count; they dance

Half a million Colombians have been killed in the last 50 years. But that’s maths. Colombians don’t talk about numbers. They talk of brothers, cousins, mothers and uncles. Numbers are the lifeless illustrations of academics and journalists who forget about life and tally death on decorated walls. Four million forcefully displaced, nine million hungry, three million kids out of school…

“Bury the dead and keep on dancing,” they say here. And they dance.

Ana, mother of 11, makes arepas - corn bread - on a rainy street. She and her family were forced to flee their home on the Pacific coast because of violence.

Art

On the tile floor is Colombia. A sculptured mound of brown earth: two coasts, the Amazon, a peninsula in the north, and the Andes split into three – central, east and west.
A pale, hairy arm emerges from the eastern range. The hand lies still, palm down, across the humid eastern plains. From the highest peaks of the central range pokes a masculine nose. Death lies beneath Colombian soil.
Art.
A Cadaver becomes art, a message; anger, sad and silent. I look at Colombia spread across the floor. The arm is real. It absorbs my vision. From behind the white tape I look, bewildered, mouth open, breath slow, blank.
And suddenly it moves. Uuup and dooowwn. Slowly. Colombia is breathing; it is alive.

Upstairs in the gallery are photographs of war, torment and hardship in the Americas. Each photographer’s name is written with a brief description below the black and white prints: ‘Nicaragua’, ‘Guatemala’, ‘Prostitute’ and ‘Refugee’. The photos are beautiful.

Is this resistance? Seeking beauty in misery? Composing the right elements – the dirt floor foreground, diagonal lines, an anguished look towards oblivion, the dark evening clouds looming on the horizon? I’m not the first to address this contradiction. What role does art play in social change?

I can only think that peace emerging from war is not merely a physical change but an ethical and cultural change in which beauty and discussion play a critical part. Art, at least at its best, is a dialogue.

Bullet Holes in the door of a small, family home - A 1am reminder that Colombia is not at peace

A new friend and fellow photographer, Jonny Lewis, told me a story. He was exhibiting in Paris in a group show. His photograph was a portrait of an Aboriginal elder in northern Australia, a woman with the leathery, weatherworn face of a sea turtle. A Parisian woman approached the photograph slowly, one leg moving in unison with a walking stick, her back hunched with age. The woman looked up at Jonny’s photo. “Bonjour Madam,” she said.

Communication. Art at its best! The question, then, is what each of us chooses to say.

Aguapanela

Every city has a flavour. Returning to a familiar city is like visiting your grandparents as a kid. There’s a certain indescribable smell that becomes more familiar and distinct each time you visit. In Medellin, Colombia’s second largest city, the smell is more an overwhelming sensation. From a distance it is a city of red bricks climbing defiantly up the steep green walls of a long valley. A northerly mountain breeze cools the city and blows away the black smoke belched by colourful, noisy buses, leaving it bright and clear. Flowers are everywhere. So are music, fruit, and men and women selling something – anything – on the city streets.

A mathematical genius collects tomato crates to sell at the local market

My wife is from this city that is known in Colombia as the place of eternal spring, and infamous elsewhere as the once home of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. I lived here for 18 months. After two years away, everything says, smells, feels and sounds Medellin: distinct and familiar. The carved shapes of wooden window panes, the texture of slippery terracotta tiles, local expressions, honking horns and screeching brakes, thick tangles of electricity cables within reach of second-story red-brick homes; close enough to hang clothes to dry.

The evening after arriving we visit friends high on the city’s eastern valley wall. We pass kids playing football on streets so steep the local diesel buses struggle to climb them in first gear. One team gloats a considerable gravitational advantage, and the goalkeeper on the downward side has added motivation. If he lets a goal through the walk down to collect the ball is a healthy hike. Behind the buses kids on bikes tow a ride up the hill with a short length of rope. Nothing, it seems, has changed.

Until we arrive at our friends’ perpetually nearly-constructed home. There’s a little more roof than two years ago. Whenever the family saves a little money, they make a fire on the street and cook a big stew called sancocho – three meats, potatoes, yuccas, plantain – for local friends who come to help build the house. But the extra section of roof is not what’s changed. A few additional roof tiles do not alter the city’s flavour.

It’s the custom in every Colombian home to offer something to guests. Traditionally the something is aguapanela, water boiled with pure blocks of condensed sugarcane juice, panela. The aguapanela is usually heated and served with coffee or drinking chocolate, or served cold with lemon juice, depending on the time of day, and a pot of it has long been a permanent fixture on the stove of every Colombian home.

A Young girl plays with freshly cooked panela before it hardens

On this occasion, however, we are offered glasses of coca cola. My wife and I look at each other in bewildered shock, and in half-gest we protest that we haven’t come umpteen thousand kilometres to be served something as atypical and ubiquitous as coke.

But a litre of coke, we are told, has become cheaper than aguapanela. The next day, we discover why.



The bus to Altamira leaves at 7:30 in the morning. It’s a four-hour trip up, down, over and around fertile mountains cloaked in cloud. A thousand shades of vegetation paint the landscape. The overall effect is a world of green.

The view from Altamira

Altamira is a small town in Colombia’s coffee region. It’s an obscure little dot on the map, rarely visited by anybody who doesn’t live there, but my wife’s family has many friends there with small plots of land, and it’s these parcels of land strewn around the town that are our destination, rather than the town itself, which, for security reasons, I never actually see.

Altamira is part of Colombia’s ‘red zone.’ Ongoing guerrilla activity has resulted in heavy militarisation of the town. Police and soldiers oversee foot-traffic, and, because of nearby guerrilla activity, strangers are treated with suspicion. In 2001 three Irish tourists were detained after travelling in a red zone. They were agents of the IRA, the army announced, training Colombian rebels in urban warfare techniques. Their capture was hailed as another ‘success’ in the war against terror. Over a year later, the trio were finally repatriated and cleared of all terrorist related charges. There have been precedents of foreigners aiding guerrilla insurgency groups, however, so we decide it’s best to avoid suspicious authorities.

The bus drops us a few kilometres below the town at a friend’s home. It is the same family who we had visited the evening before. Three sisters of one family married three brothers of another. The family tree is more labyrinthine than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Garcia Márquez’s books are more real than magic.

Across the narrow dirt road, Jesus, a brother of the three sisters, is making panela in the small distillery he founded five years ago. It is a big open-air shed with a high roof and clay floor.

Earlier in the morning he has cut, with his brother and two friends, enough cane from his adjacent crop to make a month’s worth of panela for the local families, around 100kg. The cane is crushed in a fuel driven machine with a big belt that drives a series of cogs (in many places the cogs are still powered by mule or running water). The juice is collected in a big barrel before running via a tube into the first of five large vats. There the juice is heated over a cavernous cane-fuelled oven and passed from one vat to the next. The bitter froth is skimmed from the bubbling surface until the juice finally evaporates into a thick molasses in the final vat. It is then put to cool in smaller quantities and poured over one-pound moulds.

Until recently, Jesus operated his panela distillery throughout most of the year. He saved for years to establish it, often working in much larger industrial distilleries. Because the process of making panela must be done in one go, from juicing the cane through to drying the final product, he commonly worked 20-hour shifts, earning less than 50 cents an hour. “The only way to get through a shift like that,” he says, “is drink a lot of cane juice.” He also sold the little livestock he had – a few pigs – and replaced his coffee and bean crops with sugarcane.

However, since a new hygiene law was passed last year, he only operates the distillery once a month to make panela for local families. He trades it for beans, eggs, roots, plantains, papaya and other local produce. Jesus is no longer allowed to sell his panela, and he is broke.

“The government wants me to seal off the entire distillery and buy stainless steel benches and instruments,” he says. “That would cost millions of pesos. I’ve never seen that much money.”

While we talk one of his friends sweeps the clay floor. It’s a simple place, but it is kept with dignity. Three years before I visited a poor, displaced woman in her improvised one-room home in Medellin. She too swept the earth floor while we spoke. “There’s no need to let dust settle on dust,” she said with a smile.

On the surface, the modernisation of industry is a good thing. But the motives behind the new hygiene law are shady, and result in the monopolisation of a staple industry. The big end of town that mass-produces sugar derived products from thousand-hectare cane farms makes more money, while small-scale producers go broke, and the average Colombian family must economise their use of panela. In the last year, the price of panela has nearly doubled, increasing by more than 50c a kilogram. Given that two thirds of Colombians live on less than two dollars a day, that’s a big increase.

The booming ethanol industry is also a factor behind the new law and the subsequent monopolisation, says Jesus. White sugar and ethanol are more profitable than panela, which is a more pure product. “The big producers don’t want people to buy panela anymore,” says Jesus.

In the afternoon we walk for an hour along muddy mountain tracks to stay with two close friends of the family, Mariano and his wife Eumelia. My father in-law worked here in the 1970s as an agricultural engineer, and has returned frequently ever since. My wife spent much of her childhood climbing mango and orange trees with Eumelia and Mariano’s 13 children. Eumelia is now 62, has five great-grandkids, and more energy than a pound of panela.

Eumelia, 62, mother of 13, great-granma to five, walks along a mountain track to visit her son.

Their home is a beautiful, incongruent mix of modernity and tradition. Eumelia cooks on a clay oven. The ceiling is low and suspended by walls made of a mix of cow manure, mud and lime compacted over cane. A web of electricity cables climbs the mountains and powers the electric lights and a fuzzy little television with a bicycle rim for antenna. The shower is a bucket.

Eumelia tells me that when all the family lived at home she boiled two pounds of panela each day in a big pot. Mariano starts the day with a tinto at dawn, a sweet black coffee made with aguapanela, and takes a flask of energy water with him to work in the fields.

He invites me to work with him digging holes to plant coffee saplings. The terrain is steep, and it’s hard work. The productivity of his small plot of land, about a hectare, is awesome. On the ground beneath the coffee plants are bean vines, and above us plantain and banana trees shade the crops with their massive leaves. The area is so fertile that even the electricity cables have small succulents growing from them.

Before climbing back up to the house for a 9am breakfast, we collect some beans. A few square metres of terrain provide enough bean pods for several large meals.

Christian, Eumelia's grandson, plays with a hoop (future TV antenna) along a mountain track

And what meals!! Normally beans are bought dry and are soaked overnight. But Eumelia cooks us fresh beans with plantain and a green leafy vegetable called coles. They are served with rice, avocadoes picked from nearby trees, and fried ripe plantain. Mmm!!

And writing anything more after such a scrumptious gastronomical conclusion can only lead to an anticlimax, so I’ll leave it there.

Margaret

“Thank god somebody invented the remote control,” thought Margaret, 60, sitting at home in 1987. It was a big black remote kept in a plastic cover with fake fur on the underside. Andrew, the youngest of her five kids, had given it to her the Christmas before last. Her other kids had laughed when she unwrapped the silly furry present. So had her two sisters, but Margaret thought it very practical. “This blessing is worth protecting,” she said to herself, aloud, after switching off the ad, yet again.

“A woman can’t watch Sale Of A Century in peace anymore, damn it,” she said. Margaret rarely cursed. She felt attacked, as though the Grim Reaper was coming for her. Margaret’s eldest son was HIV positive. The image of Death claiming children and grandmas with bowling balls was too much. She’d wept the first time she saw the ad, now she refused to let it into her home.

“It made me feel as though my son was contaminated and dirty,” says Margaret, twenty years later. “He’s still alive, though,” she says. “He takes medication and looks after himself. He looks after me too. He hasn’t been knocked over yet.”

Jan

Jan, 42, used to dream a lot. He dreamt of travelling, of living abroad, falling in love and being accepted. Australia is a long way from Munich. He lives in Sydney with his boyfriend, Jamie, in a small apartment where they like to throw parties for their many friends. Jan has achieved his dreams. And he misses them.

He misses the quiet, safe space his dreams provided, his parallel world of endless possibility and fantasy. “I feel condemned to the present,” he says.

“Sometimes Jamie and I talk about buying a house together. But then I think, fuck, how long will he be able to live there? Why pay for something that will never be his – never be ours?”

Jamie is HIV positive. He takes anti retro-viral drugs, but his viral load is high. Jan and Jamie are both aware of his fragile mortality. “I already grieve his death, sometimes,” says Jan. “It’s horrible and I feel guilty. I have to live in the present to avoid living with death. The future makes me sad.

“My life is going to change dramatically one day. That used to excite me. Now it scares the hell out of me. I feel like all my dreams are slipping through my fingers, and they’re like water. I can’t grab them.”

Angelica

A word was written on her wrist.
The needle pierced her smooth brown skin through the dot of the letter ‘i.’ Angelica, 26, watched as the syringe vacuumed the blood from her body. She didn’t flinch.

She was already grieving two mortalities. Love. Anger. Bewilderment. Fear. Her feelings were exhausted. The needle might have been a mosquito.

Johnno looked at the tattoo and asked what it meant.

“It’s something I never want to lose,” she said.

Angelica loved her boyfriend. They’d lived together for three years, in an apartment in Sydney’s inner city. She never suspected he was bisexual, never thought to use a condom. The pill was easy and sex was great. “I’m HIV positive,” he told her one night.

Johnno looked at her arm again, his green eyes teary, and pressed the word with cotton wool. “Faith.”

Johnno

“Sorry I’m late,” says Johnno. I moved house on the weekend and I had a bit of a bender. I’m living with one and a half prostitutes.”

It’s a good introduction.

We sit in a café on Oxford Street near the community health clinic where Johhno works as a nurse. “There wasn’t any one moment I can think of,” he says. “It was more a process of realisation. I grew up near St Maries – I was a Westy – and I got engaged right after I left school. I only called it off two months before the wedding. I had to. I kept hanging around men’s toilets at pubs. I never went to any gay bars because, you know, if you go there, you’re gay. But in the gents at the local, you just liked sucking cock.

“I can’t believe that was 20 years ago. You know what’s really amazing, though?” he says. “I’m 39 and I’m still HIV neg. I can still see the Grim Reaper ads so clearly. They scared the hell out of me.”

Most of last year Johnno juggled his career as nurse and councillor with an addiction to crystal meth. “I was really lost,” he says. “It speeds everything up. An hour feels like ten minutes, and it makes you horny as hell. I just wanted sex.”

Johnno says he can talk under water. I believe him. He’s a handsome bloke, six foot something, broad shoulders, slim waist, furry chest, well groomed. He greets a dozen people on the street in the course of an hour. He happily sweeps you up into a world he knows is wild and wacky. “I love being me,” he laughs cheekily.

“I tried a lot of really kinky stuff on ICE. Leather, whips, fantasy, you name it. But I always made sure. There had to be a condom. I’ve had to be really disciplined. When I was in a long term, monogamous relationship a few years ago, I had to practice masturbating with a condom to feel the same pleasure. My partner was HIV positive.”

Johnno sees and hears a lot of first hand accounts of how HIV/AIDS affects people’s lives, and how people relate to the disease.

“A lot of young gay guys think it’s like having diabetes, or any other medically treatable disease. A lot of them actually seem relieved when they get infected. They want to have open relationships and enjoy sex. They want to feel accepted. There’s a common saying in some parts of the gay community, ‘planting the seed’, or ‘give me your seed.’ There are ‘gifting parties’ where HIV negative men go to get infected. It’s like an initiation ceremony.”

Johhno says sometimes he feels sexually discriminated against for being HIV negative. “I was first knocked back by a man in a bar earlier this year because I’m HIV neg. It’s happened to me again since then,” he says.

It would be unfair to suggest this relationship to HIV/AIDS is common to gay men, but it’s a growing trend, says Johnno, and something that concerns him. “I tell so many young guys who come in for a check up to be careful. A lot of them are on ICE. It changes personalities and makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do. Sometimes they arrive high to the clinic, and you can just tell. They’re really flirtatious. Some of them pull their dicks out, and of course afterwards they’re really embarrassed.”

Johhno agrees that the Grim Reaper adds had a big impact in Australia, and suggests that something similar is needed now. “I’m sure I’d be HIV positive now if it weren’t for those adds,” he says.

We pay for our coffees, and I ask a final question. “What do you mean, exactly, that you live with one and a half prostitutes?”

“Oh. One of them’s only part-time, God bless her.”

Frankie

Frankie, 22, sat in the sterile little space while Johnno strapped her arm tightly, preparing to draw blood. “Guess what my porn name is,” he said, grinning cheekily… “Slugo Monfarvel.” They both laughed. Johnno was a tall, masculine nurse with a Merv Hughes moustache. And he was a queen. Frankie relaxed, and thought again about what the doctor had just told her. The rate of HIV infection in Morocco is very low. She would probably be fine.

Morocco was the last stop of a three-month European trip with her best friend, but when she arrived home, Frankie spoke of little else: the four o’clock prayer call that brought Marrakesh to its knees, the acrid smells of camel leather and tanneries, the laughter of children charging for photos in narrow, moon-blue streets.
And Sam.


Sam who looked like Ben Harper and spoke four languages. Frankie had spent two unforgettable weeks with him, and fallen in love.

In Sydney the waves and traffic stopped. Life revolved around the next SMS, next email, next phone call. Old photos blue-tacked over her iron bed-frame were replaced with new ones. Life had taken on new meaning. Frankie felt loved, desired, wanted.

Soon the time between calls increased. Sam became less reliable. Frankie began to feel the distance between them in her belly more than she had on any map. He lived in Melbourne, he said, he’d be coming home soon. He had an amazing opportunity, 3000 per cent profit on the saffron. He already had a buyer. “The money’ll be yours too, babe. It’ll be ours.”

Frankie sent him $1500. Two weeks later she made an appointment at the clinic. She felt stupid, abused, used, disappointed, angry and scared. Tears followed tears. Always the same wet path down her face. Her best friend thought Sam had been high on cocaine. “I don’t know how many women I’ve had,” he’d said one night, and Frankie realised how little she knew about him. Only what they’d shared, and it still seemed so much.

Could it really have been an act? He’d said so too… it was love, a connection. They’d both felt it. Two weeks condensed into one night in Frankie’s mind. Pleasure turned to anguish. Nobody could have resisted. A tiny town in the desert, a rooftop bedroom.

The pregnancy test came out clear. Now she wondered if she could ever have a baby at all. Three months to wait. Three fucking months. And the waves crashed again at curl-curl, the traffic crawled past the apartment at peak-hour. The phone sat still.